


Filling in the Blanks

by penitence_road



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Sailor Moon Crystal - Fandom
Genre: Gen, a smidge of Rei/Jadeite, rather a lot of Queen Metalia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 16:55:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2199621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penitence_road/pseuds/penitence_road
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of short fics to fill in missing pieces of the story, updated as I notice and get hung up on them.  Chapter One: The Demands of Failure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Filling in the Blanks

**Author's Note:**

> Niggling Unanswered Plot Question: What’s Jadeite coming back from at the beginning of episode four that he’s a) the picture of not-burnt-to-a-crisp health and b) scowling and clutching his shoulder? He certainly doesn’t look like someone who’s just teleported away from the inside of a bonfire, and anyway, if the order of events is to be trusted, it’s almost a full day later.

He’s known it to happen, here and there. The intermittent failure is a given when you’re searching across six continents for a poorly-described artifact of unknown ability and, unsurprisingly, coming up empty-handed. And their great ruler had been feeble, so weak in those early days; they’d needed energy to sustain her as much as—perhaps even more than—the Silver Crystal. So when an operation was routed, foiled by a stray spiritualist or the odd government inquiry, sometimes the one in charge took responsibility, walked down into the darkness of the altar room and—gave.

Most of them hadn’t come back, and though the corners of the room are dotted with heaps of rag and bone, no trace of their spirits remains, all of it blotted out and absorbed into the miasmal depths of Metalia.

Jadeite breathes, slow, shallow, unsteady. He’s lost most of the sense of himself—is he still kneeling? has he fallen?—and the agony of burn-stretched skin is barely a memory. It drifts in fragments, an ebb-tide slurry of half-formed sensations, voices he can’t put name to, places he may never have seen with his own eyes and, all around them, lapping at their edges, the rising, choking cold. 

The recollection of burning to death would be a mercy, but there will be none of that here.

Instead, he turns his thoughts inward, toward the drifting throng. There must be other memories here, he decides, for none of the missions he can recall have taken him to white marble palaces, to the shores of a lake that glitters like the heart of a sapphire in the late afternoon sun. 

He has never seen so many roses.

Edges blur and double—Nephrite in clothes like the humans wear, staring with pensive-set features into a night sky rendered dim and obscure by muddy urban light. Kunzite in unfamiliar regalia, fastening on his cape over the weight of gleaming shoulderplate armor. Zoisite, wearing crisp formal blacks and seated at a piano, fingers dancing across the keys as a small, secret smile teases at the corner of his mouth. 

Are these his memories? Are they _anyone’s?_ Or just his imagination, his mind struggling to stitch together anything coherent as it unravels, bleeding away into the endless hunger of Metalia’s maw. 

Black hair, cobalt eyes, and laughter that was as warm as…

Jadeite cannot remember warmth. Racked and blind in the darkness, he trembles—violent, uncontrolled shaking.

The fire—the sailor guardian’s fire. It burns blue and cold in his memory, a pitiless light that scours into every corner of his existence, leaving him blackened and flaking away into stale, dead air.

A vision, a moment, a seized fragment of time—the guardian’s lips catching upwards, a traitor smile in burnished red. But Sailor Mars’ smile is a speck of ash, sucked away into the darkness of oblivion, and he is too empty to mourn something that could never have been real to begin with.

Perhaps it too—no, surely it too—was only his imagination.

**Author's Note:**

> Endymion's palace in Elysion sits at the banks of a lake that looks, once Nehellenia is banished, as gorgeous as I can imagine it possible to render water in screentone. Zoisite can, per the Casa Blanca Memories short, play the piano. I don’t think Nephrite’s stargazing has any manga basis, but it’s an aspect of the anime I like. And I checked, but I don’t think ridiculous anime shoulderplate armor actually has a real name. 
> 
> I sort of like the idea that if you screw up too much in the Dark Kingdom, then it’s up to you to take responsibility and go let the great and mighty ruler suck on your energy for a while to make up for it. It’s suitably fantasy torture, but also gives them a sort of cut-throat Japanese business place feeling, which in turn lets me amuse myself with thoughts of the Dark Kingdom daytime office drama.


End file.
